Clowning around: A chance to believe

Maggie Gordon

Updated 6:15 pm, Saturday, November 10, 2012

Editor's note: Staff writer Maggie Gordon is training to perform as a clown in the UBS Parade Spectacular, which will take to the streets of downtown Stamford next Sunday. This is the first of a series of accounts on her experience trying to fill some big shoes.

STAMFORD -- A chair is a chair. You sit in it, right?

And a spoon, well that's a spoon. It's what you use to eat ice cream, cereal and blue-box macaroni.

"In polite society, a chair is a chair. It's something you sit on. But what if you used it as something else?" Emily Season asked Thursday night. "Think about the way small children look at the world, before the politeness. When a spoon isn't just a spoon -- suddenly it's a sword."

A flashback crept into my mind. I was 4, and obsessed with "The Little Mermaid." While sitting at my family's kitchen table, I picked up the fork on my plate of French toast, called it a "dinglehopper," and ran it through my brown hair, just like I'd seen Ariel do in my favorite movie.

I still remember the look of shock on my mother's face as she saw it catch into a stringy, syrupy mess. How she gasped when the fork stayed right where it was, stuck and hanging almost perpendicular from my straight hair after I peeled my sticky fingers from its handle. My dad's attempt to stifle a chuckle.

Forks were forks, my mother told me. We use them to eat, not to brush our hair, regardless of what Ariel did her first time at a dinner table.

But what if?

"Imagine you're just seeing something for the first time -- it could be anything, you could use it for anything," Season said Thursday.

Season, who is a professional clown, was speaking to about a dozen aspiring clowns attending the first of two training sessions for the UBS Parade Spectacular.

I was among the dozen, and we made up the group of beginners at the training, while a second group of more experienced clowns worked on higher level concepts and skills.

It's a beautiful thought, especially after the past two weeks, when we've battled blackouts, divisive and exhausting attack ads and a post-election nor'easter.

Imagine the leaves that blew into my bedroom when the wind knocked the air conditioner out of my window were just confetti. The days without power were just a game of peekaboo. Slipping backward down my street as I tried to drive up the hill in the snow was just a game on the playground.

Clowns help problems melt into magic. It seems effortless -- a floppy flower and a sideways smile are simple gestures.

But if there's one thing I learned Thursday, it's that Clown College is not an easy class to ace.

Learning to unlearn and let go is tough. Throwing away notions of polite society to run around a room clucking like a chicken (yes, we did that), or partake in a kickline while twirling a parachute can be unsettling at first.

At the beginning of my first clown training, I was afraid of judgment. That people would laugh at me, rather than with me. That I wasn't doing it right. That I would fall. Was I being silly enough? Or too silly?

But the thing about magic is that you don't have to be afraid or self-conscious.

You just have to believe. It took a few icebreakers and exercises, but I believe again, and I'm excited to do my part and share magic with the city of Stamford on Nov. 18.

Because sometimes a spoon is a spoon, and sometimes a fork is a dinglehopper -- if you believe it is.